Spam Like This Makes Me Doubt The Validity Of My “Industry”

I received this e-mail at work today:

Subject: Nicholas, question

Hi Nicholas, on behalf of our Board I wanted to ask if you would like to become a part of the PR  Summits because of your experience and key role.

We are a high level group comprised of top PR and Communications executives and visionaries. We meet monthly by phone to exchange what is working, what is not, strategies and ideas. Our main goal is to help each other achieve. For a list of those you would be interacting with and upcoming meeting dates see:
www.thepublicrelationssummit.org

I am certain you will find the experience really useful in your efforts. Let me know of your decision (or relay if you think another is more appropriate as we wish involvement from your company). Thanks Nicholas.

Yours Truly,
Matthew T. Keener
PR  Summits
The Organization of PR and Communications Executives

This message is confidential and intended only for the original recipient. If you have received this message in error, please delete it or mail us back with re move in the sub ject. If any follow-up is needed I show your contact information as:  Nicholas Mirra, [redacted], Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia  215-242-9253 and you may also reach us at 2O1  17th Street, 17th Floor,  Atlanta Georgia 3O363 or through the contact page of our site.

My Google spam filter did not catch this e-mail. If it was asking me to send a secure payment to Kenya in preparation for the transmission of a large inherited sum, it would probably have been caught. Its tone and grammar mistakes would also be more fitting.

However, this is alarmingly couched in the language of “communications professionals.” And it is depressingly close to stuff I read from (more) legitimate marketing/communications channels. So there are two possible interpretations here, both bad. The first is that spambots are starting to sound like the “industry” e-newsletters I receive each week. The second is that this isn’t spam, and “top communications executives” really write like this. Either way, it makes one want to turn off the computer and go learn how to make things out of wood by hand.

From the Women Used As Images For Marketing Department: Endomondo Edition

Just came across this juxtaposition, which I find interesting in what it suggests about the ways we use women in advertising. Same website, different ads and audiences: one presumably interested in Mom, the other interested in Generic Hot Chick.

How fascinating would this be if those two “models” were switched? [If I knew Photoshop, I'd do just that.]

Click for bigger version of the object(s)

This is all separate from how cluttered the Endomondo interface is. Bleh.

I’m proud of this silly blog post I wrote for work

My day job is working as the Communications Coordinator for the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.* Sometimes I get to take some creative license with the blog posts I write for the organization. I want to share one here because I’m proud of how it turned out, and happy that I have a job that lets me make these kinds of silly jokes.

Are You Willing To Give Yourself To This People Counting Program?

- from the blog of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia

Also, this blog post echoes work I’ve done here.

*Don’t look our website up right now. It’s awful. Just read our blog or follow us on Twitter (@bcgp). We’ll get a new website fairly soon.

I got an A in high school biology but this is all I can remember

Eleven years after high school biology, I remember nothing but these three things. They improve my life on a daily basis, but they definitely do not grant me the title of “Knows Stuff About Biology”:

1. I write delta (Δ) to mean “change” in my shorthand notes, which saves time.
2. I retain a limited understanding of the concepts of enzymes and activation energy, an understanding I deploy exclusively in the creation of metaphors. (e.g. “The activation energy needed to make our BYO-paper-maché-bobsled party a successful one is pretty high.” “The enzyme in that hookup was tequila.”)
3. I know that biology is complicated and memory is a skill, and you will impress me if you know a lot about biology or remember what you learned in high school.

If you’re reading this, Dr. Merritt, I’m sorry. Although! I do remember that I enjoyed your class. Which is all that teachers care about, right? The lingering personal impressions they made upon their students? Also, your unrepentant combination of Birkenstocks and wool socks was bold for its day and remains an admirable stance.

spambots and social media experts are meeting in the middle

Are spambot Twitter accounts getting smarter, or are actual people just creating dumber Twitter profiles? Below I present three profiles that I came across in my normal Twitter usage (ie, I didn’t go looking for them). One is spam, two are real. I think.

Where are you all getting your nice LinkedIn photos?

All my friends seem to have nice, well-lit, professional-looking photos of themselves on LinkedIn. Where are you all getting these photos? I have zero such photos of myself.

From what I can tell, all of my friends’ photos were taken in professional settings. Which, I am led to believe, only happen after you’ve completed your LinkedIn profile and started “networking.” So how do you get the photo if you need the photo to attend the event? I’m obviously missing something.

Are the horns in this Deer Tick song weird, or is it just me?

I don’t have the vocabulary or knowledge of music to be able to talk about it on a sophisticated level. I’m about as far from being a musician as my family dog is from being a dentist (don’t have the brains or the thumbs for it). But I’ve encountered a moment in music so incongruous (nay, discordant? Eh? Isn’t that a musicspeak word?) that I’m hoping if I point it out, I can get somebody who knows music to evaluate my experience and tell me if I noticed something real.

(This could very easily be  Facebook post, but one of my new year’s digital resolutions is to not post new content on that platform. So this is here, and there will be a link to it on Facebook.)

Deer Tick’s song “Main Street” has always struck me as a melancholy tune. I looked them up online and found a video of them playing the song on Letterman. The Letterman version includes a horn section jarringly out of place (to me) with the rest of the song.

Here is the album track, without horns:

Here is the Letterman version, complete with weird horn section.

In particular, the horns hit a note at 2:42 that seems really out of place with the rest of the song.

Can my musically-inclined friends give me their thoughts on this? Is that 2:42 note, and the general inclusion of the horns, off in a thematic way? Or is it merely taste, and perhaps the horns are actually an interesting reinterpretation of the song? I realize songs can be played differently to vary things up, but these horns seem just misapplied to me. And I rarely get so bold as to make such judgments.